Some RSS Evangelism

A while back, I wrote a piece singing the praises of CSS, a great technology for developing web content. Now, I’m passing on the tip about RSS, a great technology for accessing web content. RSS, and it’s first-born son, Atom, are feed technologies that generate updated XML whenever a web site posts updates. You can view this XML directly of course, but the real payoff is to aggregate all your favorite feeds into a single view. Now you can instantly scan all of your daily blogs in a single session.

How to do it? Well, for starters, you are using Firefox, aren’t you? Start out with Firefox’s Live Bookmarks. This may be all you need. You won’t see all your feeds in a single view, but you can do a very quick scan. Really want to see everything in a single pane? You can add feeds to both My Yahoo and Google. Or, you can use Newsgator (which adds its own comments section to your posts–definitely don’t like that).